In a big vote of confidence for OpenStack, HP today announced HP Converged Cloud, a suite of public and hybrid cloud services that incorporate the open source cloud platform.

Amid growing industry support OpenStack, Citrix raised eyebrows recently when it announced that it was ditching its OpenStack-based Project Olympus project for its own open source cloud software called CloudStack. Could be schisms be forming so early in OpenStack's rise?

HP doesn't look concerned.

Today's announcement signals that HP believes OpenStack has what it takes to power enterprise-class workloads. HP already leads in cloud equipment and a successful cloud implementation could add momentum to the OpenStack community by hastening adoption and broadening market opportunities for software developers, service providers and technology partners.

For its part, the company is enlisting a "hardened" version of OpenStack and is touting a flexible, converged set of services that allow enterprises to pave pathways to the cloud as computing workloads test the constraints of traditional, on-premise IT. "HP Converged Cloud enables enterprises to incorporate a blend of public, private and managed cloud services with their existing IT to create a seamless hybrid environment that rapidly adapts to their changing requirements," states Bill Veghte, chief strategy officer and executive vice president for HP Software.

In support of that vision, the company will roll out a HP Public Infrastructure-as-a-Service public beta on March 10th. Similar to other IaaS offerings currently on the market, HP will offer on-demand compute, online storage and accelerated online content caching. A limited private beta, also scheduled for the same day, will provide MySQL support and block storage movement between compute instances.

HP's plans also include a suite of hybrid cloud services, including Cloud Maps, a set of prepackaged application templates that work with CloudSystem to provide "push-button deployment" of cloud-delivered applications. Testing of these apps is accomplished via HP Service Virtualization 2.0, which provides IT administrators with a simulated, virtualized environment on which to apps through their paces.

Private clouds are getting some attention in the form of new Enterprise Cloud Services, which allow companies to outsource private cloud management. Virtual Application Networks software is an application deployment and management automation solution for organizations that would rather administer their own clouds on legacy networks.

Additionally, HP is tackling security with the Virtual Network Protection Service and network performance with HP Network Cloud Optimization Service. The latter works to, "improve cloud-based service delivery by up to 93 percent compared to traditional download techniques," according to the company.

Lastly, HP wants to sharpen the skill sets of IT personnel with Engineering Cloud Transformation Services and new Cloud Security Alliance training courses.